A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
"Rochberg presents the rare spectacle of a composer who has made his peace with tradition while maintaining a strikingly individual profile. . . . [H]e succeeds in transforming the sublime concepts of traditional music into contemporary language."
---Washington Post
"An indispensable book for anyone who wishes to understand the sad and curious fate of music in the twentieth century."
---Atlantic Monthly
"The writings of George Rochberg stand as a pinnacle from which our past and future can be viewed."
---Kansas City Star
As a composer, George Rochberg has played a leading role in bringing about a transformation of contemporary music through a reassessment of its relation to tonality, melody, and harmony. In The Aesthetics of Survival, the author addresses the legacy of modernism in music and its related effect on the cultural milieu, particularly its overemphasis on the abstract, rationalist thinking embraced by contemporary science, technology, and philosophy. Rochberg argues for the renewal of holistic values in order to ensure the survival of music as a humanly expressive art.
A renowned composer, thinker, and teacher, George Rochberg has been honored with innumerable awards, including, most recently, an Alfred I. du Pont Award for Outstanding Conductors and Composers, and an André and Clara Mertens Contemporary Composer Award. He lives in Pennsylvania.
What happens when fossil fuels run out? How do communities and cultures survive?
Central Appalachia and south Wales were built to extract coal, and faced with coal’s decline, both regions have experienced economic depression, labor unrest, and out-migration. After Coal focuses on coalfield residents who chose not to leave, but instead remained in their communities and worked to build a diverse and sustainable economy. It tells the story of four decades of exchange between two mining communities on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and profiles individuals and organizations that are undertaking the critical work of regeneration.
The stories in this book are told through interviews and photographs collected during the making of After Coal, a documentary film produced by the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University and directed by Tom Hansell. Considering resonances between Appalachia and Wales in the realms of labor, environment, and movements for social justice, the book approaches the transition from coal as an opportunity for marginalized people around the world to work toward safer and more egalitarian futures.
In the minds of many, black street speech—the urban dialect of black Americans—bespeaks illiteracy, poverty, and ignorance. John Baugh challenges those prejudices in this brilliant new inquiry into the history, linguistic structure, and survival within white society of black street speech. In doing so, he successfully integrates a scholarly respect for black English with a humanistic approach to language differences that weds rigor of research with a keen sense of social responsibility.
Baugh's is the first book on black English that is based on a long-term study of adult speakers. Beginning in 1972, black men and women in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Austin, and Houston were repeatedly interviewed, in varied social settings, in order to determine the nature of their linguistic styles and the social circumstances where subtle changes in their speech appear. Baugh's work uncovered a far wider breadth of speaking styles among black Americans than among standard English speakers. Having detailed his findings, he explores their serious implications for the employability and education of black Americans.
Black Street Speech is a work of enduring importance for educators, linguists, sociologists, scholars of black and urban studies, and all concerned with black English and its social consequences.
The drug war that has turned Juárez, Mexico, into a killing field that has claimed more than 7,000 lives since 2008 captures headlines almost daily. But few accounts go all the way down to the streets to investigate the lives of individual drug users. One of those users, Scott Comar, survived years of heroin addiction and failed attempts at detox and finally cleaned up in 2003. Now a graduate student at the University of Texas at El Paso in the history department's borderlands doctoral program, Comar has written Border Junkies, a searingly honest account of his spiraling descent into heroin addiction, surrender, change, and recovery on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Border Junkies is the first book ever written about the lifestyle of active addiction on the streets of Juárez. Comar vividly describes living between the disparate Mexican and American cultures and among the fellow junkies, drug dealers, hookers, coyote smugglers, thieves, and killers who were his friends and neighbors in addiction—and the social workers, missionaries, shelter workers, and doctors who tried to help him escape. With the perspective of his anthropological training, he shows how homelessness, poverty, and addiction all fuel the use of narcotics and the rise in their consumption on the streets of Juárez and contribute to the societal decay of this Mexican urban landscape. Comar also offers significant insights into the U.S.-Mexico borderland's underground and peripheral economy and the ways in which the region's inhabitants adapt to the local economic terrain.
This anthology highlights central values and traditions in Native American societies, exploring the ongoing struggles and survival power of Native American people today. The essays and stories by well-known writers provide an excellent introduction for general readers as well as high school and college students. The stories and historical events are drawn especially from the tribes of the Great Lakes region, such as the Ojibwa (Chippewa) of Wisconsin, and are part of a continuing, sustaining storytelling tradition.
Starting with the opening selection, “The Circle of Stories,” which reaffirms the relationship of humans to all living things, the anthology emphasizes themes of connectedness and survival in essays on the environment, identity, community allegiance and treaty rights, marginalization and assimilation in American society, and conflict within the educational system. Several selections about Trickster tales introduce traditions of humor, irony, and imagination that have come to embody native survival, liberation, and continuance.
The authors included in Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds are Kim Blaeser, Joseph Bruchac, George Cornell, Fred Hoxie, James Oberly, Denise Sweet, Tom Vennum, and Gerald Vizenor.
Traces the craft of pottery making among the Catawba Indians of North Carolina from the late 18th century to the present
When Europeans encountered them, the Catawba Indians were living along the river and throughout the valley that carries their name near the present North Carolina-South Carolina border. Archaeologists later collected and identified categories of pottery types belonging to the historic Catawba and extrapolated an association with their protohistoric and prehistoric predecessors.
In this volume, Thomas Blumer traces the construction techniques of those documented ceramics to the lineage of their probable present-day master potters or, in other words, he traces the Catawba pottery traditions. By mining data from archives and the oral traditions of contemporary potters, Blumer reconstructs sales circuits regularly traveled by Catawba peddlers and thereby illuminates unresolved questions regarding trade routes in the protohistoric period. In addition, the author details particular techniques of the representative potters—factors such as clay selection, tool use, decoration, and firing techniques—which influence their styles.
Nobody says Shakespeare is dead, Antonio Fava tells us, but Commedia, they say, is dead. Why? Because clearly, he goes on, we have Shakespeare's texts, but nobody knows what to do with the improvisation that is the basis of the Commedia dell'Arte, despite massive documentation. This book by Fava, one of the few living master teachers of Commedia dell'Arte, is the first aesthetic and methodological study of the traditional Italian theater form--the first to describe, in a precise and practical way, what Commedia is and what it should be.
The mask--as object, symbol, character, theatrical practice, even spectacle itself--is the central metaphor around which Fava builds his discussion of structure, themes, characters, and methods. Drawing on twenty years of research conducted through his work as performer, director, mask maker, and scholar, he offers extensive practical, philosophical, and technical guidelines to performing the stock characters of Commedia, observing its structure, extracting its poetics, exploring its themes, and using the mask. A densely layered text combining historical fact, personal experience, philosophical speculation, and passionate opinion, and including copious illustrations--period drawings, prints, and color photographs of leather Commedia masks made by Fava himself--The Comic Mask in the Commedia dell'Arte is a rich work of singular insight into one of the world's most venerable forms of theater.
The authors of The Compassionate Court? provide case studies of such programs and draw upon interviews and observations conducted over a decade to reveal how participants and professionals perceive court-affiliated PDPs, clients, and staff. Considering the motivations, vision, and goals of these programs as well as their limitations—the inequity and disempowerment of their participants—the authors also present their own changing perspectives on prostitution courts, diversion programs, and criminalization of sex work.
Click here for a Facilitator’s Guide to Diabetes among the Pima
Long neglected by the academic world because of her rejection of belletristic values and resistance to convenient literary taxonomy, Doris Lessing has nonetheless built an international following of serious, dedicated readers. Acknowledging the difficulties posed by the multiple dimensions of Lessing’s work, Kaplan and Rose have gathered eleven essays that address her artistic, philosophical, political, and psychological complexity, and so provide a welcome introduction to the extraordinary depth and diversity of this important contemporary novelist.
Lessing has been described as an “alchemical” writer, in that her work is directed toward changing people’s lives and perceptions rather than simply recording experience. Accordingly, the contributors examine her various postures and tactics for the purpose of discovering how the alchemical elements inform her various personae. Frederick C. Stern discusses Lessing’s commitment to radical humanist thought, while Carey Kaplan examines how Lessing’s imperialist past has shaped her futuristic fiction. Elizabeth Abel offers a feminist interpretation of the pattern of brother-sister incest in Lessing’s work, showing how Lessing has established Antigone as a female alternative to the Oedipal myth of male incest. Particularly insightful is Eve Bertelsen’s report of her interview with Lessing, demonstrating how Lessing’s often evasive style of adversarial dialogue works in concert with her refusal to be conveniently pigeonholed by academic analysis.
For those readers new to her work, Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival will serve as a useful introduction to Lessing’s concerns and techniques. Those who have long admired her writing will find in this collection new keys to understanding Lessing’s philosophical, political, and psychological complexity.
A powerful debut and a lyric coming-of-age narrative that interrogates the myths we carry
In Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles. As he leaves home and forges toward California, the speaker in these poems considers how we learn and mislearn ideas about manhood, confronts the aftershocks of childhood sexual abuse, and questions the human need for belonging. By embracing the touchstones of youth—movies, lore, graphic novels—these poems assert the speaker’s defiant right to childhood even amid damage.
As the collection arcs toward adulthood, the speaker embodies a vision of healing that refuses easy binaries and embraces the joys of intimacy. Across each of its five acts, Perry Janes’s debut collection is driven by an interest troubling our creation myths, asking who built them, why we carry them, and how we might set them aside.
In writing about Boston Chinatown's long history, Michael Liu, a lifelong activist and scholar of the community, charts its journey and efforts for survival—from its emergence during a time of immigration and deep xenophobia to the highway construction and urban renewal projects that threatened the neighborhood after World War II to its more recent efforts to keep commercial developers at bay. At the ground level, Liu depicts its people, organizations, internal battles, and varied and complex strategies against land-taking by outside institutions and public authorities. The documented courage, resilience, and ingenuity of this low-income immigrant neighborhood of color have earned it a place amongst our urban narratives. Chinatown has much to teach us about neighborhood agency, the power of organizing, and the prospects of such neighborhoods in rapidly growing and changing cities.
The Pequots have found success at their southeastern Connecticut casino in spite of the odds. But in considering their story, Paul Pasquaretta shifts the focus from casinos to the political struggles that have marked the long history of indigenous-colonial relations. Viewing the survival of Native communities in the face of genocide and forced assimilation as a high-stakes game of chance, he examines gambling metaphors in historical and literary contexts to reveal strategies employed by several tribes as they participate in various "games" with white society--whether land re-acquisition, political positioning, or resistance to outside dominance.
Through a comparative analysis of texts spanning four centuries—colonial war narratives, nineteenth-century romance fiction, tribal memorials, Native American novels—Pasquaretta provides a framework for understanding Indian-white relations and the role of "chance" in the realm of colonialism. He explores two intertwining themes: the survival of indigenous peoples in the face of the European invasion of North America and the ongoing contest of Natives and newcomers that has transpired in the marketplace, on the battlefield, and in the courts. In so doing, he considers the impact of reservation gambling on the development of contemporary tribal communities and the role of traditional Indian gambling practices and stories in the survival of indigenous cultural traditions.
Gambling and Survival in Native North America is a wide-ranging book that shows how Native Americans have become active participants in their own survival despite the popular belief that Indian tribes, as "conquered peoples," have been rendered helpless for over a century. Working within a system devised to confine and even destroy them, they have found ways to remain in the game—and, against all odds, have learned to play it well.
In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them.
Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city.
Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.
Alexis S. McCurn draws on nearly two years of naturalistic field research among adolescents and adults in Oakland, California to provide an ethnographic account of how black women accomplish the routine tasks necessary for basic survival in poor inner-city neighborhoods and how the intersections of race, gender, and class shape how black women interact with others in public. This book makes the case that the daily consequences of racialized poverty in the lives of African Americans cannot be fully understood without accounting for the personal and collective experiences of poor black women.
Rachel Koskin was a middle-class Russian Jew born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1896. Ten years later, her family fled from the murderous pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire eastward to Harbin, a Russian-controlled city within China’s borders on the harsh plain of Manchuria. Full of lively detail and the struggles of being stateless in a time of war, the narrative follows Rachel through her life in Harbin, which became a center of Russian culture in the Far East; the birth of her daughter, Helmi, in Kobe, Japan; their life together in the slums of Shanghai and back in Japan during World War II, where they endured many more hardships; and their subsequent immigration to the United States.
This remarkable account uncovers a history of refugees living in war-torn China and Japan, a history that to this day remains largely unknown. It is also a story of survival during a long period of upheaval and war—from the Russian Revolution to the Holocaust—and an intimate portrait of an American immigrant family. David reveals both the joys and tragedies he experienced growing up in a multicultural household in post\-Second World War America with a Jewish mother, a live-in Russian grandmother, and a devout Irish Catholic American father.
As David develops a clearer awareness of the mysterious past lives of his mother and grandmother—and the impact of these events on his own understanding of the long-term effects of fear, trauma, and loss—he shows us that, even in times of peace and security, we are all shadows of our past, marked by our experiences, whether we choose to reveal them to others or not.
Rachel Koskin was a middle-class Russian Jew born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1896. Ten years later, her family fled from the murderous pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire eastward to Harbin, a Russian-controlled city within China’s borders on the harsh plain of Manchuria. Full of lively detail and the struggles of being stateless in a time of war, the narrative follows Rachel through her life in Harbin, which became a center of Russian culture in the Far East; the birth of her daughter, Helmi, in Kobe, Japan; their life together in the slums of Shanghai and back in Japan during World War II, where they endured many more hardships; and their subsequent immigration to the United States.
This remarkable account uncovers a history of refugees living in war-torn China and Japan, a history that to this day remains largely unknown. It is also a story of survival during a long period of upheaval and war—from the Russian Revolution to the Holocaust—and an intimate portrait of an American immigrant family. David reveals both the joys and tragedies he experienced growing up in a multicultural household in post\-Second World War America with a Jewish mother, a live-in Russian grandmother, and a devout Irish Catholic American father.
As David develops a clearer awareness of the mysterious past lives of his mother and grandmother—and the impact of these events on his own understanding of the long-term effects of fear, trauma, and loss—he shows us that, even in times of peace and security, we are all shadows of our past, marked by our experiences, whether we choose to reveal them to others or not.
Melanie Holmes tells the story of Johnston's journey from a nature-loving Boy Scout to a committed geologist. Blending science with personal detail, Holmes follows Johnston through his encounters with Aleutian volcanoes, his work helping the Portuguese government assess the geothermal power of the Azores, and his dream job as a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Interviews and personal writings reveal what a friend called “the most unjaded person I ever met,” an imperfect but kind and intelligent young scientist passionately in love with his life and work and determined to make a difference.
Jay Neugeboren and his brother, Robert, grew up in Brooklyn in the years following World War II. Both brothers—smart, talented, and popular—seemed well on the way to successful lives when, for reasons that remain ultimately mysterious to this day, Robert had a mental breakdown at age nineteen. For the past forty years Jay has been not only his brother’s friend and confidant, but his sole advocate, as Robert continues to suffer from the ravages of the illness that has kept him institutionalized for most of his adult life.
Imagining Robert tells the story of these two brothers and how their love for one another has enabled both to survive, and to thrive in miraculous, surprising ways. It is the most honest book yet on what it is like for the millions of families that must cope, day-by-day and year-by-year over the course of a lifetime, with a condition for which, in most cases, there is no cure. By never giving up hope and by valuing his brother’s uniqueness and humanity, Jay Neugeboren reveals how even the grimmest of lives can be sustained by the power of love.
A film based on Imagining Robert aired on PBS nationally in 2003. With a new afterword that brings readers up to date on Robert’s life, Rutgers University Press is pleased make this highly praised book with its inspiring story available once more to the public.
As a member of Salvador Allende’s Personal Guards (GAP), Luz Arce worked with leaders of the Socialist Party during the Popular Unity Government from 1971 to1973. In the months following the coup, Arce served as a militant with others from the Left who opposed the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet, which controlled the country from 1973 to1990. Along with thousands of others in Chile, Arce was detained and tortured by Chile’s military intelligence service, the DINA, in their attempt to eliminate alternative voices and ideologies in the country. Arce’s testimonial offers the harrowing story of the abuse she suffered and witnessed as a survivor of detention camps, such as the infamous Villa Grimaldi.
But when faced with threats made to her family, including her young son, and with the possibility that she could be murdered as thousands of others had been, Arce began to collaborate with the Chilean military in their repression of national resistance groups and outlawed political parties. Her testimonial thus also offers a unique perspective from within the repressive structures as she tells of her work as a DINA agent whose identifications even lead to the capture of some of her former friends and compañeros.
During Chile’s return to democracy in the early 1990s, Arce experienced two fundamental changes in her life that led to the writing of her story. The first was a deep spiritual renewal through her contacts with the Catholic Church whose Vicariate of Solidarity had fought for human rights in the country during the dictatorship. The second was her decision to participate within the legal system to identify and bring to justice those members of the military who were responsible for the crimes committed from 1973 to1990. Luz Arce’s book invites readers to rethink the definition of testimonial narrative in Latin America through the unique perspective of a survivor-witness-confessor.
Rabbi Thorne composed his memoir under extraordinary conditions, confined to a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty. But, It Will Yet Be Heard is remarkable not only for the story of its composition, but also for its moral clarity and complexity. A deeply religious man, Rabbi Thorne bore witness to forced labor camps, human degradation, and the murders of entire communities. And once he emerged from hiding, he grappled not only with survivor’s guilt, but also with the lingering antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Poland even after the war ended. Harrowing, moving, and deeply insightful, Rabbi Thorne’s firsthand account offers a rediscovered perspective on the twentieth century’s greatest tragedy.
“I’ve heard that some volcanic eruptions are soft with oozing streams of lava dancing down the side of the volcano like a Las Vegas chorus line. My father’s eruptions were quick, like bricks being thrown through a window.”
Denise Tolan’s memoir-in-essay traces the legacy of violence in an Italian American family, showing how abuse reverberates both in the body and mind of a family. The book’s first part, “Blood is Not Water,” lays out how the origins of violence can infect the roots of a family tree. The second part, “Good Blood Doesn’t Lie,” shows what grows from those roots. Italian Blood is a raw, heartbreaking series of essays where everything is connected through literal and metaphorical blood. These essays offer a connection to anyone who suffered childhood shame, violence, or fear and provide reassurance that they are not alone.
“The greenhouse effect is us, and it is specifically us in the Western world.” This is one of the messages at the beginning of Anita Gordon and David Suzuki’s startling view of our future on Earth. More than any other time in history, the 1990s have marked a turning point for human civilization. Not only are we facing ecological disasters that will affect our ability to survive, but the crisis is forcing us to reexamine the entire value system that has governed our lives for the past two thousand years.
Gordon and Suzuki warn us of the transition we will need to make if we are to arrive safely in the next century. More than a book on the environment, this is a book about us as a species: our shortsightedness, our failure to read the warnings, our inability to grasp the significance of our actions-and the tough decisions we have to make in order to save ourselves.
The power of the book lies in the consensus of the many voices, those of scientists and other scholars, that speak through it. The components of our predicament—global warming, soil erosion, acid rain, species depletion, ozone damage, rainforest destruction, overpopulation—are quantified with authority. And never before has such a strong consensus been expressed in a single warning. The message we receive is that our actions are taking place in a political and economic world that demands radical change.
In an effort to counteract this blueprint for disaster, Gordon and Suzuki present a resounding rebuttal of technological optimism and the belief that continued economic growth is a prerequisite for environmental reform. The intellectual fog of sustainable development is incisively dispelled, and in its place the authors suggest practical contributions that individuals as well as governments can make toward creating a “conserver society.”
Born in a small farming village, Pao was destined to be a Hmong clan leader, wedding negotiator, or shaman. But the course of his life changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the Hmong faced persecution for their role in helping US forces fighting communism in the region. After more than two years in Thai refugee camps, Pao and his surviving family members boarded the belly of an “iron eagle” bound for the United States, where he pictured a new life of comfort and happiness. Instead, Pao found himself navigating a frightening and unfamiliar world, adjusting to a string of new schools and living situations while struggling to fulfill the hopes his parents had once held for his future. Now in Modern Jungles, Pao Lor shares his inspiring coming-of-age tale about perseverance, grit, and hope.
Born in a small farming village, Pao was destined to be a Hmong clan leader, wedding negotiator, or shaman. But the course of his life changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the Hmong faced persecution for their role in helping US forces fighting communism in the region. After more than two years in Thai refugee camps, Pao and his surviving family members boarded the belly of an “iron eagle” bound for the United States, where he pictured a new life of comfort and happiness. Instead, Pao found himself navigating a frightening and unfamiliar world, adjusting to a string of new schools and living situations while struggling to fulfill the hopes his parents had once held for his future. Now in Modern Jungles, Pao Lor shares his inspiring coming-of-age tale about perseverance, grit, and hope.
Included are discussion questions for use by book clubs, in classrooms, or around the dinner table.
The complete resource on backcountry camping from a legendary wilderness expert.
In this classic guide, first published in the late 1950s, Rutstrum covers the key elements of a successful camping trip: the proper way to build a raft, chop down a tree, construct a campsite, cook over a campfire, find a way through the woods, and much more. Drawing upon his vast experience in all kinds of weather, Rutstrum provides essential knowledge for every camper, in a lightweight volume perfect for the backpack.
Probably the largest of its kind in West Africa, the Kumasi Central Market houses women whose positions vary from hawkers of meals and cheap manufactured goods to powerful wholesalers, who control the flow of important staples. Drawing on more than four years of field research, during which she worked alongside several influential market "Queens", Clark explains the economic, political, gender, and ethnic complexities involved in the operation of the marketplace and examines the resourcefulness of the market women in surviving the various hazards they routinely encounter, from coups d'etat to persistent sabotage of their positions from within.
The first series of essays concentrates on the mechanisms Epicurus devised to assure the survival of the philosophy beyond its Athenian roots. Clay presents social history on an equal footing with doctrine, and offers for the first time evidence for hero cults among philosophers who believed that the soul died with the body. The second set of essays concentrates Epicureanism in the age of Cicero, Philodemus, and Lucretius. In the four essays on De Rerum Natura, Lucretius is viewed not as a transparency through which we can view the Greek of Epicurus, but a Roman philosopher in control of both doctrine and rhetoric. The book concludes with the study of the philosophy in Oenoanda, Lycia, in which the author brilliantly situates post-1968 discoveries from Oenoanda and the Villa de Papiri in Herculaneum in the context of the second-century mountain city.
This study of Epicureanism as a social movement will be of interest to students of ancient philosophy and the philosophy of early modern Europe, when Epicureanism was revived. In addition, scholars of the New Testament will find parallels to the rise and spread of Christianity.
Diskin Clay is the R. J. R. Nabisco Distinguished Professor of Classical Studies, Duke University.
Abélès examines the new global politics, which assumes many forms and is enacted by diverse figures with varied sympathies: the officials at meetings of the WTO and the demonstrators outside them, celebrity activists, and online contributors to international charities. He makes an impassioned case that our accounts of globalization need to reckon with the preoccupations and affiliations now driving global politics. The Politics of Survival was first published in France in 2006. This English-language edition has been revised and includes a new preface.
At the age of twenty-five, Primo Levi was sent to Hell. Levi, an Italian chemist from Turin, was one of many swept up in the Holocaust of World War II and sent to die in the German concentration camp in Auschwitz. Of the 650 people transported to the camp in his group, only 15 men and 9 women survived. After Soviet liberation of the camp in 1945, Levi wrote books, essays, short stories, poetry, and a novel, in which he painstakingly described the horrors of his experience at Auschwitz. He also spent the rest of his life struggling with the fact that he was not among those who were killed.
In Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Frederic D. Homer looks at Primo Levi's life but, more important, shows him to be a significant political philosopher. In the course of his writings, Levi asked and answered his most haunting question: can someone be brutalized by a terrifying experience and, upon return to "ordinary life," recover from the physical and moral destruction he has suffered? Levi used this question to develop a philosophy positing that although man is no match for life, he can become better prepared to contend with the tragedies in life.
According to Levi, the horrors of the world occur because of the strength of human tendencies, which make relationships between human beings exceedingly fragile. He believed that we are ill-constituted beings who have tendencies toward violence and domination, dividing ourselves into Us and Them, with very shallow loyalties. He also maintained that our only refuge is in education and responsibility, which may counter these tendencies. Homer calls Levi's philosophy "optimistic pessimism."
As Homer demonstrates, Levi took his past experiences into account to determine that goodwill and democratic institutions do not come easily to people. Liberal society is to be earned through discipline and responsibility toward our weaknesses. Levi's answer is "civilized liberalism." To achieve this we must counter some of our most stubborn tendencies.
Homer also explores the impact of Levi's death, an apparent suicide, on the way in which his work and theories have been perceived. While several critics discount Levi's work because of the nature of his death, Homer argues that his death is consistent with his philosophy. A book rich in brutally honest philosophy, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival compels one to look at serious questions about life, tragedy, optimism, solidarity, violence, and human nature.
Challenging the ideology of treatment in the prison world
The Professional Convict’s Tale: The Survival of John O’Neill In and Out of Prison offers a unique, inside view of life behind bars in the 1960s. Elmer H. Johnson, a criminologist who has specialized in prison life for half a century, gave Menard Penitentiary parolee John O’Neill a tape recorder and a set of questions designed to draw out his opinions and observations about the prison world.
This study frames O’Neill’s responses with Johnson’s analysis. O’Neill’s narrative guides readers through the world beyond the prison gate as he shares his strategies for survival and proposes alternatives to rebellion or submission. He discusses the fractionalization between the keepers and the kept and the effects that subterranean communication, threats of inmate predators, and prison riots can have on the psyche of both inmates and staff.
O’Neill’s frustrations and the inadequate responses from the community to which he was paroled illustrate the social costs and impact of parole for the community and for the parolee. Although O’Neill recorded his comments more than forty years ago, they are still relevant today when thousands of convicts are being released from prison each year.
A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire into the surrounding forests, farms, and towns. Only about forty-two of them, including Fiszel, are known to have survived to the end of the war.
Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz, now an American citizen, tells his eyewitness story here in the real-time perspective of his own boyhood, from his childhood before the war and his internment in the brutal Izbica ghetto to his harrowing six months at Sobibór—including his involvement in the revolt and desperate mass escape—and his rescue by courageous Polish farmers. He also recounts the challenges of life following the war as a teenaged displaced person, and his eventual efforts as a witness to the truth of the Holocaust.
In 1943 the heroic leaders of the revolt at Sobibór, Sasha Perchersky and Leon Feldhendler, implored fellow prisoners to promise that anyone who survived would tell the story of Sobibór: not just of the horrific atrocities committed there, but of the courage and humanity of those who fought back. Bialowitz has kept that promise.
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association for School Libraries
Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association for School Libraries
Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
When DJ Lee’s dear friend vanishes in the vast Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana, she travels there to seek answers. The journey unexpectedly brings to an end her fifteen-year quest to uncover the buried history of her family in this remote place. Although Lee doesn’t find all the answers, she comes away with a penetrating memoir that weaves her present-day story with past excursions into the region, wilderness history, and family secrets.
As she grapples with wild animal stand-offs, bush plane flights in dense fog, raging forest fires, and strange characters who have come to the wilderness to seek or hide, Lee learns how she can survive emotionally and how the wilderness survives as an ecosystem. Her growing knowledge of the life cycles of salmon and wolverine, the regenerative role of fire, and Nimíipuu land practices helps her find intimacy in this remote landscape.
Skillfully intertwining history, outdoor adventure, and mystery, Lee’s memoir is an engaging contribution to the growing body of literature on women and wilderness and a lyrical tribute to the spiritual connection between people and the natural world.
Many of these stories are in some way lessons in resistance and survival in a world where “the toughest kid on the block,” often an outsider, demands that a group of children “play or pay,” on his terms. González demonstrates that where traditional strategies have proposed the model of the “trickster” or the “paradoxically astute fool,” to mock the pretensions of the would-be oppressor, new trends indicate that the region’s children—and those who write for them—show increasing interest in playing the game on their own terms, getting to know the Other, embracing difference, and redefining their identity and role within the new global culture.
Resistance and Survival emphasizes the hope underlying this contemporary children’s literature for a world in which all voices can be heard and valued—the hope of an authentic happy ending.
The pressures on this tropical forest are palpable. So are people’s responses to these pressures. What was once the state’s economic mainstay, cacao production, is only now beginning to make a comeback after a disease decimated the crops of large and small farmers alike. Tourism, another economic hope, is susceptible to economic crises and pandemics. And the threat of a massive state-led infrastructure project involving mining, a railroad, and an international port has loomed over the region for well over a decade.
Southern Bahia is at a crossroads: develop a sustainable, forest-based economy or run the risk of losing the identity and soul of this place forevermore. Through the lives of environmentalists, farmers, quilombolas, and nativos—people who are in and of this place—this book brings alive the people who are grappling with this dilemma.
Anthropologist Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons brings the eye of a storyteller to present this complex struggle, weaving in her own challenges of balancing family and fieldwork alongside the stories of the people who live in this dynamic region. Intertwined tales, friendships, and hope emerge as people both struggle to sustain their lives in a biodiversity hotspot and strive to create their paradise.
R. Eric Platt examines in Sacrifice and Survival the history and evolution of Jesuit higher education in the American South and hypothesizes that the identity and mission of southern Jesuit colleges and universities may have functioned as catalytic concepts that affected the “town and gown” relationships between the institutions and their host communities in ways that influenced whether they failed or adapted to survive.
The Catholic religious order known as the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) manages a global network of colleges and universities with a distinct Catholic identity and mission. Despite this immense educational system, several Jesuit institutions have closed throughout the course of the order’s existence. Societal pressures, external perceptions or misperceptions, unbalanced curricular structures rooted in liberal arts, and administrators’ slow acceptance of courses related to practical job seeking may all influence religious-affiliated educational institutions. The religious identity and mission of these colleges and universities are fundamentals that influence their interaction with external environs and contribute to their survival or failure.
Platt traces the roots of Jesuit education from the rise of Ignatius Loyola in the mid-sixteenth century through the European development of the Society of Jesus, Jesuit educational identity and mission, the migration of Jesuits to colonial New Orleans, the expulsion of Jesuits by Papal mandate, the reorganization of Jesuit education, their attempt to establish a network of educational institutions across the South, and the final closure of all but two southern Jesuit colleges and a set of high schools.
Sacrifice and Survival explores the implications of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, yellow fever, Georgia floods, devastating fires, the Civil War, the expansion of New Orleans due to the 1884 Cotton Centennial Exposition, and ties between town and gown, as well as anti-Catholic/anti-Jesuit sentiment as the Society of Jesus pushed forward to create a system of southern institutions. Ultimately, institutional identity and mission critically impacted the survival of Jesuit education in the American South.
In Solidarity and Survival, three generations of Iowa workers tell of their unrelenting efforts to create a labor movement in the coal mines and on the rails, in packinghouses and farm equipment plants, on construction sites and in hospital wards. Drawing on nearly one thousand interviews collected over more than a decade by oral historians working for the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, Shelton Stromquist presents the resonant voices of the men and women who defined a new, prominent place for themselves in the lives of their communities and in the politics of their state.
Drawing on his workshops in Rochester, Talarico describes a unique approach for eliciting poetry from people of many ages and backgrounds—particularly underpriviledged urban kids and the elderly. The process—from dialogue to self-expression to publication to public event—illuminates the urgency and meaning of releasing the spirit captured in each man and woman and child’s experience. "Some people say that Ross Talarico has done the impossible," the Today Show remarked of his success in Rochester; and with this book Talarico offers the same opportunity to others. Teachers, community leaders, parents, and children will be able to follow his practical, hands-on approach to encouraging self-expression in diverse, even unlikely, settings. They will see here how poetry is indeed relevant, ever more crucial to our identity as the culture evolves—how it is, finally, the place where the inarticulate can come to speak for themselves.
Of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, only half survived. In Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners.
Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience. Kis details the women’s resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences. Following the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003), this book is a must-read for anyone interested in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.
Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research
The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR.
Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust.
Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative.
Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.
Focusing on the importance of discussions about sovereignty and of the diversity of Native American communities, Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story offers a variety of ways to teach and write about indigenous North American rhetorics.
These essays introduce indigenous rhetorics, framing both how and why they should be taught in US university writing classrooms. Contributors promote understanding of American Indian rhetorical and literary texts and the cultures and contexts within which those texts are produced. Chapters also supply resources for instructors, promote cultural awareness, offer suggestions for further research, and provide examples of methods to incorporate American Indian texts into the classroom curriculum.
Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story provides a decolonized vision of what teaching rhetoric and writing can be and offers a foundation to talk about what rhetoric and pedagogical practice can mean when examined through American Indian and indigenous epistemologies and contemporary rhetorics.
Contributors include Joyce Rain Anderson, Resa Crane Bizzaro, Qwo-Li Driskill, Janice Gould, Rose Gubele, Angela Haas, Jessica Safran Hoover, Lisa King, Kimberli Lee, Malea D. Powell, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Gabriela Raquel Ríos, and Sundy Watanabe.
On July 10, 1971, during birthday celebrations for King Hassan II of Morocco, attendant officers and cadets opened fire on visiting dignitaries. A young officer, Aziz BineBine, arrived late and witnessed the ensuing massacre without firing a single shot, yet he would spend the next two decades in a political prison hidden in the Atlas Mountains—Tazmamart. Conditions in this now-infamous prison were nightmarish. The dark, underground cells, too small for standing up in, exposed prisoners to extreme weather, overflowing sewage, and disease-ridden rats. Forgetting life outside his cell—his past, his family, his friends—and clinging to God, BineBine resolved to survive. Tazmamart: 18 Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison is a memorial to BineBine and his fellow inmates’ sacrifice. This searing tale of endurance offers an unfiltered depiction of the agonizing life of a political prisoner.
In her compelling and controversial arguments, Wickman rejects the myths that erase Native Americans from Florida through the agency of Spaniards and diseases and make the area an empty frontier awaiting American expansion. Through research on both sides of the Atlantic and extensive oral history interviews among the Seminoles of Florida and Oklahoma, Wickman shatters current theories about the origins of the people encountered by the Spaniards and presents, for the first time ever, the Native American perspective. She describes the genesis of the groups known today as Creek, Seminole, and Miccosukee—the Maskoki peoples—and traces their common Mississippian heritage, affirming their claims to continuous habitation of the Southeast and Florida. Her work exposes the rhetoric of conquest and replaces it with the rhetoric of survival.
An important cross-disciplinary work, The Tree That Bends reveals the flexibility of the Maskoki people and the sociocultural mechanisms that allowed them to survive the pressures introduced at contact. Their world was capable of incorporating the New without destroying the Old, and their descendants not only survive today but also succeed as a discrete culture as a result.
The book studies women’s and families’ use of cultural knowledge, community activism, and teaching and learning spaces. Throughout, Trinidad Galván provides answers to these questions: How does the migration of loved ones alter community, familial, and gender dynamics? And what social relations (convivencia), cultural knowledge, and women-centered pedagogies sustain women’s survival (supervivencia)?
Researchers, educators, and students interested in migration studies, gender studies, education, Latin American studies, and Mexican American studies will benefit from the ethnographic approach and theoretical insight of this groundbreaking work.
Richter-Devroe's ethnographic approach draws from revealing in-depth interviews and participant observation in Palestine. The result: a forceful critique of mainstream conflict resolution methods and the failed woman-to-woman peacebuilding projects so lauded around the world. The liberal faith in dialogue as core of "the political" and the assumption that women's "nurturing" nature makes them superior peacemakers, collapse in the face of past and ongoing Israeli state violences.
Instead, women confront Israeli settler colonialism directly and indirectly in their popular and everyday acts of resistance. Richter-Devroe's analysis zooms in on the intricate dynamics of daily life in Palestine, tracing the emergent politics that women articulate and practice there. In shedding light on contemporary gendered "politics from below" in the region, the book invites a rethinking of the workings, shapes, and boundaries of the political.
In this revised edition of her groundbreaking work, Hu-DeHart reviews and reflects on the growth in scholarship about the Yaqui, including advances in theoretical frameworks and methodologies on borderlands, transnationalism, diaspora, and collective memory that are especially relevant to their history.
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